This is the dark side of China’s booming economy. The world’s most populous nation is undergoing a high-speed industrial revolution, transforming the country in record time. But this economic engine needs energy to keep it going. And in China, that almost always means coal. China produces and consumes nearly 1 billion tons of it every year, accounting for a quarter of the world’s supply. Coal fuels the factories that have sprouted along China’s coastline, heats the houses being built across its countryside and feeds the power plants churning out electricity for its expanding cities. China relies on coal–it accounts for as much as three quarters of the country’s energy consumption–because it has a huge supply and low labor costs make it cheap to mine.
China’s troubled coal industry consists primarily of large, state-owned mines struggling to avoid bankruptcy and small, private or village-owned mines, many operating illegally. Both the large and the small mines have appalling safety records. An estimated 10,000 Chinese coal miners are killed in accidents every year, more than anywhere else in the world. The smaller mines are particularly dangerous. Some are little more than holes in the ground, barely wide enough for a miner to crawl into and grab what he can with his bare hands. More than 70 percent of China’s mining deaths occur in the small, locally owned and private mines, where state-run industry journals have reported a fatality rate exceeding 17 deaths per million tons of coal produced. By comparison, the rate is less than .05 for coal mines in the United States and Britain, and less than one in India and Russia.
But China’s appetite for coal carries risks for more than just the miners. The country’s coal addiction has also harmed the environment, and is not something that’s likely to improve any time soon. Coal burning remains the leading cause of pollution in Beijing, despite a decadelong effort to wean the city off it. And it’s not merely a local hazard. The effects of coal-burning pollution from power plants have drawn complaints from Japan and South Korea about acid rain “made in China.” Even the West Coast of the United States suffers from the dirty byproducts of coal combustion.
Desperate to clean up its act before the 2008 Olympics, Beijing officials plan to cut the city’s coal use in half over the next several years and instead rely on cleaner energy sources like natural gas. In fact, the central government has asked the entire country to drastically cut coal consumption. The move is a 180-degree turn from earlier energy policy. During the 1980s, local officials and private investors were encouraged to open tens of thousands of small mines. These days Beijing is issuing the opposite decree: close and consolidate as many mines as possible, while still meeting the country’s energy needs. But this is no easy task, as illegal mines often reopen just weeks after being ordered to shut down.
China is trying to reduce its dependency on coal through more inventive ideas than imperial edict. Across the country, in big ways and small, government and citizens are experimenting with new techniques. The southern province of Guangdong announced last year that under its Blue Sky scheme, all coal- and oil-burning plants must install by 2010 equipment to trap pollutants such as sulfur dioxide. The Shenhua Group Corp., one of several modern mining businesses, is building a $2 billion facility in Inner Mongolia that will convert coal into gasoline through a process kinder to the environment than refining crude oil. The company already produces some of the cleanest coal in China and boasts an equally clean safety record. In Tibet, officials boast that solar power has helped cut the region’s coal consumption by 127,000 tons.
These plans hold great promise, but unless Beijing gets serious about the routine tasks of governance–protecting workers’ rights, rooting out corruption, saving natural resources–coal may continue to darken the future. Government officials did not learn of the cave-in at the Fuyuan Coal Mine until eight days afterward. The mine owners, recalls a mournful Zhang, were concerned only about concealing the deaths of his brother and the other miners. “They sent some gangsters to beat up relatives to keep them from telling anyone what happened,” says Zhang. Now, five months after his younger brother’s death, Zhang has returned to his village in Hubei province. “I didn’t want to work in a coal mine anymore,” he says. “It’s too dangerous.” If only China could avert the dangers as well.
